Kenneth leaned back in his chair, the familiar creek reminding him it was probably about time he bought a new one. The low hum of the UV lights on the table in front of him was strangely comforting, the warmth of the lamps adding an unquantifiable element of comfort. Still he focused his attention on the seven petri dishes in front of him.

The dishes each had a small piece of tofu sitting next to a small clump shavings from various metals, a thin layer of filmy white growing over each and around the edges of the dish. He zoomed in viewing the first colony carefully, watching the billions of nanites move and coalesce carrying instructions from one hive to the next. Each drone following the orders he had so carefully engineered into them.

This was the hundred and eighty-second generation of nanites in this dish, the ancestors of the first bit of comparatively cheap and near useless nanites he had managed to acquire raw. Seven distinct hives had developed, each more powerful than the implant currently circulating through his body, and specially engineered to remove all the standard security measures. No GPS tracking would be able to locate these, and without a body to effect, no commands to incapacitate their user could be carried out.

He gave each other colony, forty hives all told, a quick one over to make sure they were building in normal parameters. He pulled on his old style computer headset, making a few last adjustments to ensure comfort. The three dimensional interface opened up, leaving him at the operating system’s primary interaction level. Turned to the left and picked up a blue block, then threw it in front of himself where it flattened and stabilized, floating in the air like an old fashioned television screen.

The initial reports from the nanites forming their connections to the mesh scrolled across the screen. It seemed almost painfully slow at times, even with the fastest bandwidth headset he could find, it wasn’t as fast as thinking the command. Still patience was his strong suit, and the ability to evade detection had it’s benefits. How strange that IP addressing had opened the world to the wonders of communication, and now it formed the perfect bubble to close that world out.

Finally the text logs of a half dozen Air Force commanders scrolled across the screen. He always enjoyed their discussions on catching the hacker they only ever referred to as “that annoying fucker”, it was good to know you were popular.

Finally his eyes rested on the initial report on the Delta Airliner that had gone down last night. Unknown biological entity… The full report didn’t seem to have any useful information. Whether that was to keep it away from his eyes, or because they just honestly didn’t know much, he couldn’t tell. But still it made him curious, sent his mind a thousand miles an hour down the fast lane. Finally he disconnected from the Air Force feed.

He quickly built a new pattern search for all black level connections, first key word, “biological”. Again he relaxed, watching the results roll in and automatically become stored in a local database.